


A Dog For Every Occasion

by Doodled93



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Gen, Short Chapters, Will has his dogs, bark, character (dog) death, dog lovers are sexy, his dogs have him, prompts wanted, seeing a man about a (pack) of dogs, woof - Freeform, yes this is a fic bout dogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-22
Updated: 2013-08-22
Packaged: 2017-12-24 08:01:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/937544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Doodled93/pseuds/Doodled93
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham has a dog for every occasion.<br/>Will's dogs take care of him just as much as he takes care of them.<br/>(A look into the personalities of some of his dogs over the years.)</p><p>AN: Written as someone who owns a dog, and did a freak-out before getting him because I wanted to know all about dogs so I didn't screw over whichever canine came home with me.</p><p>Feel free to prompt me for more dogs and situations :) But otherwise I'm done... <br/>(AN: I'll add chapters if I think of other dogs to focus on, but otherwise this is marked as done.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Suzie

**Author's Note:**

> I like dogs. I like Will Graham a hell of a lot more because of his many many dogs.

Though he takes comfort in all of his dogs, in his _pack_ , it’s Suzie who he goes to when he needs a hug. A bit of a cuddle.

Contrary to what most movies and televised series would have you believe, most dogs aren’t comfortable with hugs. They don’t like having arms squeezing around their neck, across their scruff, they don’t like the imposed closeness of your face right next to theirs.

Suzie is an anomaly in this. She’s caramel with coffee legs, and big amber eyes, and will sit between his legs if he crouches. She’ll curl up in the circle of his lap on the floor, all fifty pounds of her, and will be perfectly content to stay there for hours on end, the rest of the pack sprawled around them.

Will makes sure, even when he doesn’t need to hug, when he doesn’t need the contact himself, that he makes time for her. 


	2. Winston

All of his dogs are strays.

He has never once walked into a shelter—hasn’t had to, not in Wolftrap Virginia.

No shelter, no breeder, and no family surprised with a litter have ever had Will come to their door, because he’s got his strays.

It sometimes takes some time to bring them to his house; food left out, hours spent lounging and looking harmless, talking in soft tones, but every stray he has ever come across has ended up in his house at some point.

And even without a fence, even without a leash, somehow he’s gotten them to stay.

That’s not to say he doesn’t occasionally need one of his dogs to go off his property.

When he goes wandering, or when he heads out to fish, to go ice fishing, to just wander his property, at least half of his pack usually accompanies him.

His dogs don’t leave the property unless it’s with him.

It’s not a thing he’d ever thought about being grateful for, not until he started sleepwalking.

Not until Winston followed him.

Followed him, made sure he was safe.

Made sure he wasn’t alone.

He doesn’t know the circumstances that made Winston a stray, doesn’t know for _any_ of his dogs, really, but somehow he thinks perhaps he belonged with a family, once.

Perhaps one with children, ones at the age where they are wont to wander off, ones who would need assistance, protection, company, so that parents can afford to look away for the ten seconds it takes for a kid to wander off…

Will doesn’t see himself as a child, but in the confusion during the ride home in the police cruiser, he cards his fingers through Winston’s black-orange flecked coat and feels better.

Is happy.

All of his dogs follow his lead; all of his dogs follow his instruction; but it is Winston who follows him into the night. 


	3. Brody

There was one case, in between Wills time as a cop and his time as a teacher, where he helped with a case with his particular talent. It wasn’t a serial killer—it wasn’t even a kill, really, but he’d helped out.

The man, Sam Anderson, was paranoid and manic in his pursuit of those he decided were after him. After puncturing his ex-girlfriend’s lung and rupturing his at-one-time best friend’s kidney, he ran.

He ran, and ran, and actually managed to stay hidden long enough for Will to look into his mind, feel what he was feeling, and point the FBI in the right direction.

The night before they caught him, Anderson found out about Will. Found out that he was somehow helping the FBI, that he was somehow very good at what he did (Will’s reputation as a profiler not yet as well known), and so veered towards Wolftrap, to Will, instead of his Stepmother in Catonsville.

Will had night terrors then, too, but not nearly as bad, and so when Anderson slipped into his house through breaking his window, Will doesn’t stir.

Doesn’t notice most of his dogs head downstairs to investigate the noises outside, with Anderson already on the outcropping outside his room.

He does stir, when his mastiff-lab-mutt mix Brody starts barking. More so when his few (at the time) other dogs take up the chorus.

Wakes up when Anderson starts screaming in alarm when he finds his arm being held in the maw of his gentle giant of a dog.

Knocking Anderson out is easy with his focus on Brody, when he can’t hear Will walking around him from the cacophony of barking around him, and after he’s had his wrists tied together behind his back with spare fishing line, he does a cursory check of his arm.

Brody’s mix is interesting in that he got his size and his general body type from his Mastiff side, but his face and mouth are all lab.

Labs are used in hunting so much because their back teeth have such a gap. It’s convenient for hunters because it means Labs can carry ducks and rabbits and other fowl and small mammals in their mouths without damaging the skin with their teeth.

Brody’s mouth, paired with his size, meant that he could hold Anderson’s arm in his mouth without breaking skin.

This was good, Will realized, because he still hadn’t gotten Brody his shots quite yet.

Will keeps his hand on Brody’s head while police remove Sam Anderson from his home, keeps his other dogs away form the mess of glass with a gesture, and feels tired affection for his gentle, ferocious protector.

When he dies a year and a half later, Will mourns and nearly brings the large Burmese mix he finds by the highway to the shelter, wary of putting his heart out to another large breed, but ends up bringing Mandy home anyway.

Larger breeds of dogs have a shorter lifespans due to their size, he thinks to himself, but that only means they need too find a good home that much sooner. 


	4. Peaches

Will regrets the fact that his job… his _second_ job, the non-teaching one, brings him away from home so often.

He doesn’t like to leave his dogs alone for so long, even when he knows he can trust Mrs. Frobisher to make sure they’re fed and let out regularly. Doesn’t like it even when he can get Dr. Lecter to come over, because then he knows they’re getting fed both the kibble _and_ the raw cuts of meat he adds to their diet.

It’s a relief when he comes home from particularly long case and he can pet and coddle and just _be_ with his pack.

He vaguely remembers leftover pasta in his fridge, and while it’s reheating in the microwave he pulls frozen cuts of meat out for his dogs, tossing them small pieces and making sure each got their fair share.

The microwave beeped and he tossed the last few pieces to his two newer strays, both underfed and even more starved for affection.

He shovels the first forkful of pasta in his mouth without looking, and Peaches, a Jack Russell Terrier with a raggedy ear and a crooked tail, starts barking at him. Lunges, and jumps up against his legs, tries to climb up into his lap even with his legs splayed. Focused on his Tupperware.

“What, no, you can’t have this, pasta’s not good for dogs,” he tries, confused.

Peaches is a picky eater, one of the few dogs he can trust not to join in feasting on rotted carcasses that inevitably showed up in the spring thaw, and hasn’t ever shown interest in anything other than kibble and the cuts of meat he doles out.

He looks at his food, wondering what it—oh.

He makes a face at the unnatural tinge, and eyes the green fuzz that had overtaken half of the container.

_Oh. Right._

He goes through his fridge after throwing out that mess, and pulls out al the rotted food.

He sighs to himself and makes himself a sandwich, grabbing a few cuts of his dogs meat to thaw and cook up for himself, and thinks that he won’t mention this little incident to Hannibal.

Won’t mention that he didn’t think anything of eating leftovers from two weeks ago, and gives Peaches a vigorous belly scratch in thanks. 


	5. Smudge

Growing up in Louisiana, Will always had pets.

Everyone his age had pets.

Well, so long as you could catch them.

In his neighborhood, if you weren’t aiming for reptiles, amphibians, bugs, you found your mammalian target and stalked it.

You made yourself friendly, you stole away scraps from your dinner and from your pantry to tempt it, and you caught it.

Regardless of what you caught, you’d spend the day making up the appropriate environment, tempted it with various foods and, usually, got bored of it within the week.

Occasionally someone caught something interesting enough to keep it in your mind, to regale your friends with how you managed to catch it, to show it off.

Will was different to the kids in his neighborhood, in that he’d had a grand total of two pets for the years he’d lived there.

Cindy, a box turtle he’d managed to keep alive for two and a half years, and Smudge.

Smudge was taller than Will on his hind legs, and all white save for the smudge of red-brown that came up his muzzle and across his eyebrow. He was missing one ear, was bow legged, and didn’t like to be touched anywhere other than his lower back and just above his tail, and it didn’t bother Will.

He got bones and meat scraps from the local butcher every day, and was content with walking around the neighborhood with him, sitting and reading a book while rubbing his back, and though he didn’t have a collar everyone recognized Will’s dog.

His dad didn’t care that he spent his meager allowance on better cuts of meat, and let him pull out his old kiddy pool to give Smudge a bath the one time he came to his house smelling of dead things and sewage.

He didn’t know how old Smudge was, because he never got any bigger, and the only sign of aging was his steadily fading smudged face, but Smudge was his dog for five years.

Five years, and Smudge’s smudge was a hazy red-brown stain on his face even when he wasn’t there anymore.

Will knows it’s likely he’s dead, a year later, because he can still remember the last day he saw him, when Smudge went against all his usual restraints and put his head in Will’s lap one afternoon when he was reading, and stayed like that until it was getting dark and Will had to get home.

Smudge had walked him back to his house, as usual, and with a pat goodbye, had wandered off into the neighborhood, as usual.

And then he didn’t show up the next day.

Or the next.

So Will knows it’s likely he’s dead, that he’d died soon after that subtle goodbye, but still he heads to their usual reading spot the day before he leaves with his dad to move to his new job location.

Waits there all day, and leaves a bine at the tree he usually leaned against.

It’s the first time Will loses a dog, the first time he’d ever _had_ a dog, and it’s Smudge that he thinks of any time he finds a stray with a grumpy attitude, with a dislike of being pet certain places, with a distinct walking pattern due to bow-leggedness.

He thinks of him with Fondness, and even ends up telling Dr. Hannibal Lecter of him, two decades later.

It’s good. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to ask that if anyone has an idea for a chapter, please tell me! Prompt me in the comments or at my tumblr (http://doodled93.tumblr.com/) for dog personalities and situations you'd like me to write :)


End file.
